Table Of ContentJob Name: -- /344192t
Lee Marvin
Point Blank
D W A Y N E E P S T E I N
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Copyright © 2013, Dwayne Epstein
Afterword copyright © 2013 Christopher Marvin
Published in the United States
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner without the written permission of
the publisher, Schaffner Press.
For permission to reprint, contact:
Schaffner Press, Inc., POB 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717
ISBN:978-1-9361824-0-4
For Cataloguing-in-Publication Information
contact the publisher:
Schaffner Press, Inc: POB 41567, Tucson, Az 85717
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To My Parents
Morris Epstein Royce Epstein
1927-2005 1930-2008
and
Claudia Leslie Marvin
1958-2012
In Loving memory
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Marvin Matters vii
PART I : BOOT CAMP
1: The Guilty Puritan 5
2: “Dogface” vs. St. Leo 18
3: “I Have Had My Fill of War” 33
4: “These Horrible, Animal Men” 52
PART 11 : IN THE TRENCHES
5: The Merchant of Menace 75
6: “You Look Like You Need a Hand” 91
7: Man in a Straitjacket 107
8: “Lady, I Just Don’t Have the Time” 123
PART III : TAKING THE POINT
9: “Tension, Baby, Just Tension” 143
10: Everybody Gets Their “Vicaries” 159
11: “I Ain’t Spittin’ On My Whole Life” 178
PART IV : THE REAR ECHELON
12: The White Eye 203
13: May the Best Script Win 215
14: The Last of the Wintry Heroes 230
Epilogue: The Inglorious Bastard Sons Of Lee 249
Afterword by Christopher Marvin: My Father 254
Appendix:
Important Dates in Lee Marvin’s Life 256
Unmade Films of Lee Marvin 260
Films Lee Marvin Could Have Made 261
Acknowledgments 262
End Notes 264
Bibliography/Author Interviews 279
Index 289
Photographic Credits 302
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“You plan the wars you masters of men
plan the wars and point the way
and we will point the gun.”
from Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo
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DWAYNE EPSTEIN
Lee Marvin as he is best remembered, in the World War II classic,
The Dirty Dozen. Of his own time in the war, he said, “I concluded it’s every man
for himself… The most useless word in the world is h-e-l-p.”
vi
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LEE MARVIN : POINT BLANK
INTRODuCTION
Marvin
Matters
April 5, 1950, on a windy New York night, twenty-six-year-old
Lee Marvin did the unthinkable. For young actors in the 1950s
hoping to be the next Marlon Brando or Marilyn Monroe, their
Mecca was the Actor’s Studio in Manhattan, which taught the so-
called Stanislavsky Method, pioneered by the renowned acting coach
Lee Strasberg and the equally venerated director Elia Kazan. It was
fated on that Thursday night that Lee Marvin, who was auditing
the class, would do a scene to be critiqued by Strasberg. Marvin had
prepared a monologue based on the Hemingway short story “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which a man dying of a gangrenous leg
wound looks back on the disappointments in his life.
When Marvin had finished his piece, Strasberg led the students
in deconstructing all that he decreed was wrong with Marvin’s per-
formance. He stated coldly that the scene failed since the actor never
conveyed the pain of gangrene to the audience. But Lee Marvin, a
former combat Marine, informed Strasberg that it was he, the teach-
er, who was mistaken. Marvin, having seen the effects of gangrene up
close while fighting in the jungles of the Pacific, explained to Stras-
berg in the presence of his disciples that in the terminal stage of this
condition there is no pain. The small theater fell into stony silence,
which was suddenly shattered when Strasberg, furious at being cor-
rected by a student, told the young actor to get out and never come
vii
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DWAYNE EPSTEIN
back. Marvin had no problem with that, bellowing “fuck you!” as he
turned on his heels, never to return.
Whereas young non-conforming actors were begging just to get
into The Actor’s Studio, Lee Marvin walked out. Although Marvin
had shown Strasberg to be the Emperor with no clothes, this school
of modern acting still remained Strasberg’s empire. Banished from
the realm, and unwilling to conform to Strasberg’s idea of a natural-
istic—yet basically still European—method, Lee Marvin continued
to toil in the Hollywood dream factories for over a decade before he
was finally able to make his mark as a film star. He accomplished this
by believing steadfastly that his time would come via a less refined
but even more realistic concept based on this incontrovertible truth:
Man is a violent animal, and the American male the most brutal of
them all.
As noble as America had always tried to be in attempting to rise
above this tendency, the fact is that this trait towards aggression had
existed since the nation’s inception. Benjamin Franklin had said as
much in defending the colonies’ right to exist autonomously. Eng-
land’s legal concept of a duty to retreat to the wall when confronted
by violence was changed in America to standing one’s ground in
similar circumstances.
It is a peculiarly American point of view that has affected the na-
tion’s collective consciousness and culture. Author Richard Maxwell
Brown stated succinctly in his book, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and
Values in American History,1 “…the metaphorical and symbolic im-
pact of the transition from duty to retreat to standing one’s ground
is obvious and is crucial to the American identity. In the realms of
both peace and war, it is not in the nature of America to approve re-
treat. Standing one’s ground is an attitude that has deeply permeated
our foreign relations and our military habits as well as the peaceful
pursuits of daily life.”
American films rarely reflected this violent nature as it truly ex-
isted, choosing instead to justify it with nobility and bravado. Lee
1Brown, Richard Maxwell, No Duty To Retreat: Violence and Values in American History.
NY: Oxford University Press, 1999, p 6.
viii
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LEE MARVIN : POINT BLANK
Marvin, a veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of WWII, knew
this better than most, stating some years later in a Playboy interview
(January,1969), “In a typical John Wayne fight in a barroom… tables
and bottles go along with mirrors and bartenders, and you end up
with that little trickle of blood down your cheek and you’re both pals
and wasn’t it a hell of a wonderful fight. That’s fooling around with
violence. It’s phony; it’s almost a character…”
The curtain had slipped from this facade following World War II,
when war-weary audiences no longer accepted “the hero in the white
hat” mythology. The true American character had peeked through
on occasion in such action-oriented film genres as westerns, gang-
ster films and war films, despite the puritanical restrictions set forth
by production codes and societal standards of decency. While there
was still an abundance of vacuous entertainment during the 1950s, a
much darker tone was creeping like an uninvited guest into Ameri-
can popular culture, and staying long after the party was over.
A new breed of postwar male screen icons, beginning with
Marlon Brando and rippling out to include the likes of exhibition-
ist Burt Lancaster, overly-sensitive Montgomery Clift, and apathetic
Robert Mitchum, forced the stalwarts of the old guard to give their
performances a previously unknown edge. Consider Tyrone Power
in Nightmare Alley or James Stewart’s later westerns and Hitchcock
films. Even John Wayne, the champion of American virtue, portrayed
such sadistic and psychotic characters as Tom Dunson in Red River
and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Now, it seemed, movie villains
of the era were required to be even more loathsome than ever.
Enter Lee Marvin. Middle-aged and not movie-star handsome,
the most unlikely of film superstars, he would go on to forge a unique
screen persona. He had his own “method” based purely on instinct
and personal experience. Serving his apprenticeship by portraying
countless villainous demons, he once told fellow grotesque charac-
ter actor Strother Martin, “You know, as character actors we play all
kinds of sex psychos, nuts, creeps, perverts and weirdoes. And we
laugh it off saying what the hell it’s just a character. But deep down
inside, it’s you, baby.”2
ix
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